Keyboard shortcuts are helpful in many programs, but I find them to be indispensable in having a good Acrobat experience. I’m not sure Adobe thinks they are that helpful since they turn off the single key accelerators as a default, and the table for the keyboard shortcuts is found in Chapter 19 (of 19 chapters) of the help guide.

The first thing you will have to do to enable the single-key shortcuts is to open the Preferences dialog box, and under General, select the Use Single-Key Accelerators To Access Tools option.

There are many keyboard shortcuts - here are the ones I use the most when creating eBriefs.

Ctrl+D - This brings up the Document Properties. Here, you can change the Initial View of the PDF as well as change the Title, Author, Subject and Key Words. Other settings can be changed here, but Initial View and Description are the two I most often edit.

Ctrl+B - This short cut will create a bookmark to the page and view that you are currently on. Bookmarks are very helpful in navigating PDFs and creating them is a task anyone using Acrobat should master. If the document has searchable text (OCR) and you highlight a piece of text and then press Ctrl+B, the bookmark created will use the selected text. You can see where this comes in handy in our Creating eBriefs manual.

Ctrl+Shift+N - Go to a specific page number of a PDF

Ctrl+Shift+I - Insert Document

Ctrl+Shift+D - Delete Page(s)

L - The Link tool - the meat and potatoes of eBriefs

T - The Touch Up text tool - In eBrief creation this tool is helpful in changing font colors in your PDF. This does not replace your word processing program for major text changes but comes in handy for small text changes, like modifying a character or two.

U - Highlighter tool - pretty self-explanatory

H - The Hand Tool

V - Text Select Tool

Z - Marquee Zoom Tool

Home - Will take you to the first page of a PDF

End - Will take you to the last page of a PDF

I also recommend checking out the common keyboard shortcuts for Windows found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126449. Once you have mastered these shortcuts, your fingers will be dancing across your keyboard like Liberace, minus the candelabra of course.

For you experienced Acrobat users, are there other keyboard shortcuts not listed here that make your life easier? Feel free to post them in the comments section below, I would love to hear them!

Article originally appeared on Legal Hyperlinked Brief/eBrief Creation and Consulting (http://www.hyperlinkedbrief.com/).